Garden in a Glove: Plant Life Cycle in Kindergarten

Friday, November 3, 2017

Garden in a glove

We have been learning all about the plant life cycle here in Kindergarten! One project that we have loved doing has been planting our garden in gloves! I was surprised to see that only after three days, we had little sprouts coming out of our seeds. It was so precious watching the students' reactions as they spent time observing their little seeds.

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We teach the plant life cycle in the fall. I'm sure some of you are thinking, well, why does she do that? The reason is that towards the beginning of October, we schedule our pumpkin patch field trip and all of the students come home with their perfectly plump little pumpkins.

During this time we talk about the pumpkin life cycle. With that said, I've found it most beneficial that we squeeze in some of our plant life cycle lessons so that the students can reference their experiences with their pumpkins. We review the plant life cycle in the spring, however, creating these fun garden in a glove projects is a fun way to bring some greenery indoors while the winter season is upon us.

All of this to say, I want to share a few things that we do during our plant life cycle unit and give you a couple of free downloads that you can hopefully enjoy in your classroom!

Here are the quick links to the FREEBIE and other files in this post! Please leave comments below if you have any questions!

I typically introduce addition in the month of November so we used this activity to count seeds and then plant them in the soil on our papers. We went over the 'dot dot not a lot' rule before we began, and the kids had a great time using the seeds as counters to solve their basic addition problem.

Another activity that we absolutely have to do is plant our garden in our gloves! We had SO much fun doing this and I could not believe how quickly the seeds sprouted! Here are some pictures from our time together.

The first thing we did was gather all of the materials for the project. Below is a detailed list of what we needed.

Materials:

A variety of vegetable seeds. We picked ours up at the Dollar Store and got peas, carrots, beets, lettuce, and celery seeds.

Cotton balls

FREEBIE Printables (included in this blog post!)

Garden in a Glove 10 Day Journal

The first thing we did was lay out all of the seeds in trays. We labeled each tray with a little sticky note and made one of the trays a water tray for them to dip their cotton ball in.

We gave each student five cotton balls and had them first dip it in the water and then went in order from the peas to the beets. Once they dipped their cotton ball in the water and seeds, I helped them put each cotton ball in the fingers.

After they filled all of their fingers in the gloves with the cotton balls and seeds, I sent them to their desk with the printable for the little square cutouts that we used to label each finger. The students colored each vegetable picture and then cut them out and taped them on each finger.

After this, I used clear packing tape and taped them to our large classroom window. As the days passed, we would track the progress of our seeds in our 10 day 'garden in a glove' journal.

A couple of our favorite books to read during our plant life cycle unit are 'Tops and Bottoms' and 'Two Old Potatoes and Me'. I especially like the second book because of the illustrations and the details that the author shares about the life cycle of a potato.

We had SO much fun with this plant life cycle unit and I hope that you can enjoy some of the FREEBIES that I linked above! Comment below with any ideas you have for plant life cycle lessons!